Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Ernest Everett Just(August 14, 1883 – October 27, 1941) was a pioneering African American biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. In his work within marine biology, cytology and parthenogenesis, he advocated the study of whole cells under normal conditions, rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting.
Just was born in South Carolina to Charles Frazier Just Jr. and Mary Matthews Just on 14 August 1883. His father and grandfather, Charles Sr., were dock builders. When Ernest was four years old, both his father and grandfather died. Just’s mother became the sole supporter of him, his younger brother, and his younger sister. Mary Matthews Just taught at an African American school in Charleston to support her family. During the summer, she worked in the phosphate mines on James Island. Noticing that there was much vacant land near the island, Mary persuaded several black families to move there to farm. The town they founded, now incorporated in the West Ashley area of Charleston, was eventually named Maryville in her honor.
(con't.)
Hoping Just would become a teacher, his mother sent him to an all-black boarding school in Orangeburg, South Carolina at the age of thirteen. Believing that schools for blacks in the south were inferior, Just and his mother thought it better for him to go north. At the age of sixteen, Just enrolled at a Meriden, New Hampshire college-preparatory high school, Kimball Union Academy. Tragedy struck during Just's second year at Kimball when his mother died. Despite this hardship, Just completed the four-year program in only three years, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in 1903 with the highest grades in his class.
Just went on to graduate magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Just won special honors in zoology, and distinguished himself in botany, history, and sociology as well. He was also honored as a Rufus Choate scholar for two years.
When he graduated from Dartmouth, Just faced the same problems as all black college graduates of his time: no matter how brilliant they were or how high were their grades, it was almost impossible for blacks to become faculty members of white colleges or universities. Just then took what seemed to be the best choices available to him and was appointed to a teaching position at historically-black Howard University in Washington, D.C.. In 1910, he was put in charge of the newly-formed biology department by Wilbur P. Thirkield. In 1912, he became head of the Department of Zoology, a position he held until his death in 1941. Just was soon introduced to Dr. Frank R. Lillie, head of the biology department at the University of Chicago. Lillie, who was also chief of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, invited Just to spend the summer of 1909 as his research assistant at the MBL. For the next 20 years, Just spent every summer but one at MBL. On June 12, 1912 Ernest married Ethel Highwarden, who taught German at Howard University. They had three children: Margaret, Highwarden, and Maribel.....Read More
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NAACP takes up the clean-energy fight. The Root: A climate-justice expert offers a creative way to avoid contaminating the air we breathe.
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Amid the sea of statistics I scan each day, one jumped out recently: According to a study, African-American children are four to six times more likely than white children to die from asthma (pdf). That chronic disease, along with other illnesses, is linked to toxins pumped out by coal-fired power plants, and approximately 68 percent of African American families live within 30 miles of a coal-fired plant. Given the disproportionate impact that these illnesses have on black families, addressing these challenges is a civil rights imperative.
The NAACP has decided to shape the emerging clean economy by engaging in it. Starting this year, a full 100 percent of the energy that the NAACP’s Baltimore headquarters consumes will come from Green-E Certified Wind Power. We joined a purchasing group consisting of more than 100 other local community nonprofits and faith institutions facilitated through a nonprofit called Groundswell and the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation.
By strengthening our economic power in the electricity market, we locked in lower rates on clean energy. Our headquarters will switch to clean energy while saving $7,000 on its annual energy bill -- an 18 percent reduction. Furthermore, our members will be able to enjoy the same savings.
Creative approaches like this one are crucial to accelerating the nation's shift away from energy sources that contaminate the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. We are on our way to debunking a powerful myth that clean energy comes with higher energy costs. It’s an idea that prevents many families from insisting on clean power.
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A federal judge on Wednesday granted class-action status to a lawsuit challenging the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics, saying she was disturbed by the city’s “deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.” New York Times: Sharply Critical of Police, Judge Widens Stop-and-Frisk Suit.
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The decision by the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, of Federal District Court, provides possible legal recourse for hundreds of thousands of people who have been caught up in the Police Department’s increasingly vigorous stop-and-frisk practice, which critics say unjustly ensnares blacks and Latinos.
Over the weekend, in fact, the police disclosed that they had made more than 200,000 such stops in the first three months of 2012 – placing the Bloomberg administration on course for the largest number of annual stops in the 10 years the department has been measuring them.
In granting class action to the case, which was initially filed in January 2008 by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of four plaintiffs, the judge wrote that she was giving voice to the voiceless.
“The vast majority of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never bring suit to vindicate their rights,” Judge Scheindlin wrote.
Judge Scheindlin said the evidence presented in the case showed that the department had a “policy of establishing performance standards and demanding increased levels of stops and frisks” that has led to an exponential growth in the number of stops.
But the judge used her strongest language in condemning the city’s position that a court-ordered injunction banning the stop-and-frisk practice would represent “judicial intrusion,” and could not “guarantee that suspicionless stops would never occur or would only occur in a certain percentage of encounters.”
Judge Scheindlin said the city’s attitude was “cavalier,” and noted that “suspicionless stops should never occur.”
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Doug Kendal argues that the conservative majority on the Roberts Court is weaponizing Brown to attack the very civil rights statutes that are essential for moving the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection toward fruition. Black Voices: Fighting for Brown v. Board of Education on Its 58th Anniversary.
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Fifty-eight years ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down racial segregation in public schools and signaling the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow era. While Brown's status as an iconic victory for civil rights remains unquestioned, there is a darker lining to today's anniversary. In today's Supreme Court, Brown's legacy and meaning is very much at a crossroads. Indeed, the conservative majority on the Roberts Court is weaponizing Brown to attack the very civil rights statutes that are essential for moving the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection toward fruition. Sadly, progressives today need to do more than celebrate Brown: we need to fight for its legacy and true meaning.
The text of the 14th Amendment commands that "No State shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." While this text is "colorblind," as conservatives like to claim -- every person in this country can invoke the universal guarantee of equality contained in the Equal Protection Clause -- this does not mean that the Clause applies identically to different types of legislation. At its core, the fight over Brown is about whether the ruling sets a constitutional minimum floor, or more of a maximum limit, in terms of what federal, state, and local governments can do to redress our nation's long history of racial discrimination and ensure that the Constitution's promise of equal opportunity is a reality for all Americans regardless of race.
In the decades after Brown, under the leadership of Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger, the Supreme Court upheld and broadly interpreted civil rights statutes such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that built off Brown's central holding that African Americans could not be treated as second-class citizens in this country. While some of the efforts to bring about racial equality were race-conscious, these initial opinions held that their goal of redressing past discrimination brought them clearly under the constitutional aegis of the Equal Protection Clause, not unlike the Freedmen's Bureau Acts and other post-Civil War era statutes that provided special assistance to the newly freed former slaves. As late as the 1980s, the Court rejected the notion that Congress had to act in a purely color-blind fashion, recognizing, in the words of Justice Thurgood Marshall, that Congress and the states could pass race-conscious legislation in order to "mov[e] our society toward a state of meaningful equality of opportunity, not an abstract version of equality in which the effects of past discrimination would be forever frozen into our social fabric."
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Looking back at Huey Newton on gay rights from a 1970 speech. Hip Hop Corner: Looking Back at Huey Newton’s Thoughts on Gay Rights…In the Wake of Obama’s Endorsement.
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Huey Newton on gay rights from a 1970 speech:
During the past few years strong movements have developed among women and among homosexuals seeking their liberation. There has been some
uncertainty about how to relate to these movements.
Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about
homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals
and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed
groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.
I say ” whatever your insecurities are” because as we very well know,
sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the
mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in
the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we
want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she
might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start
with.
We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and
feelings for all oppressed people. We must not use the racist attitude
that the White racists use against our people because they are Black
and poor. Many times the poorest White person is the most racist
because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover
something that he does not have. So you’re some kind of a threat to
him. This kind of psychology is in operation when we view oppressed
people and we are angry with them because of their particular kind of
behavior, or their particular kind of deviation from the established
norm.
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Primary challenges are often a good and healthy thing in our democracy. But when the money comes from the other party, you have to wonder... After funding primary upsets in both parties, a right-wing group is taking aim at a New York lawmaker.
The Root: Will A Right-Wing Super PAC Topple Rangel?
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A ham-handed attempt by a super PAC to shake things up in the Democratic primary in New York's 13th congressional district has raised charges of "conspiracy" and outside meddling from supporters of longtime incumbent Charles Rangel.
The funding group, Campaign for Primary Accountability, says that it intends to throw its weight -- and money -- behind Rangel's main challenger, state Sen. Adriano Espaillat. Principal donors to the PAC -- which says its focus is on ousting entrenched congressional incumbents, regardless of political party or ideological bent, who seldom get challenged in primary elections -- are conservative Republicans, including a bevy of Texas businessmen and financiers.
A spokesman for Espaillat, a liberal Democrat who has served in the New York State Senate for 14 years, said that his candidate had no prior knowledge of the group's involvement in the campaign. "Senator Espaillat's campaign has no information about this or any other PAC's decision to target Congressman Rangel for defeat," said Ibrahim Khan. The primary is scheduled for June 26.
Rangel's campaign manager, Moises Perez, says that the super PAC is a front for "Texas right-wingers" who have a vendetta against the congressman. Rangel, who has represented Harlem and much of upper Manhattan in Congress for 41 years, has been outspoken in support of liberal causes, such as increased aid to veterans, economic programs to assist beleaguered cities and the Obama health care program.
Super PAC spokesman Curtis Ellis describes it as "the equalizer," seeking to balance the scales in primary elections where longtime incumbents like Rangel often receive little or no opposition from members of their own parties. "We're working to increase participation by voters, to inform them of how important it is to vote in a primary," Ellis says. "The incumbents have all the advantages in the primary, with access to lobbyists, corporate donations and money from PACs."
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UPDATE: This was linked to on the front page. In North Carolina blacks who live in urban areas rejected the Amendment 1 (often overwhelmingly), rural blacks supported it. American Prospect: Town and Country.
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With President Obama declaring his personal support for same-sex marriage the following day, North Carolina's vote became the springboard for a national conversation on African Americans, gay rights, and the 2012 presidential race. "I wonder if this will not create a crisis of conscience for some black voters, especially religious voters, especially older voters, who were supportive of Obama before and now have to say, 'What is most important to me, do I need the brother to be re-elected and what we talk about on Sunday aside?'" author and cultural critic Toure said on MSNBC's The Last Word. "Or I got my God, my Bible, my minister and we`ve been talking about this for years, and I need to focus on that and maybe I`ll stay home."
There's a problem with this story line: It ignores the actual results of the election, which show that the fault line in North Carolina was not racial at all, but rather urban-rural.
It's impossible to calculate exactly how black voters came down on Amendment 1, because there was no exit polling and voting precincts are rarely single-race. What is clear is that urban voters opposed the amendment; rural ones supported it; and that division cut cleanly across the color line.
In each of North Carolina's five largest cities, voters in majority-black precincts rejected the measure: Charlotte (52 percent), Raleigh (51 percent), Greensboro (54 percent), Winston-Salem (55 percent), and Durham (65 percent). Durham's results were dramatic: Not a single majority-black precinct supported the amendment. Several crushed it by margins of 3-to-1 and even 4-to-1. (emphasis mine)
Without a doubt, gay-marriage opponents tried to capitalize on black piousness in North Carolina, as they have elsewhere. The National Organization for Marriage revealed in a confidential memo plans to "drive a wedge between gays and blacks" nationwide by identifying African-American allies and developing "a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right." Toward that end, Amendment 1 supporters tapped Patrick Wooden, a Raleigh minister infamous for claiming that gay men insert cell phones and baseball bats into their rectums and require diapers as the result of anal sex.
But urban black voters rejected Wooden's warnings that homosexuality would cause "the extinction of the human race." Not only is African-American religious belief diverse (of course)—but even conservative Christians are informed by more than just their faith. "There is this long fundamentalist tradition in big chunks of the African-American community, and that tradition tends to come down as anti-gay," says Jim Lee, a 73-year-old black artist who spent decades doing activist work in North Carolina. When he was growing up in Durham, he says, the bullying of boys perceived to be gay was common. "But at the same time, some of the most respected and revered adult leadership and mentorship was coming from people who were either closeted-but-known gays or pretty outwardly gay. These were ministers and teachers and in one case a physician. There was this tension—and as with any conflicted population, some people wash out on one side and others wash out on the other side."
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In memoriam:
Donna Summers --- Love to love you baby
CHUCK BROWN "BUSTIN LOOSE" @ 930 CLUB
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The Front Porch is now open!
Grab a seat and get a plate! If you are new-introduce yourself and join in.
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